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SPORTS THIS MORNING

April 7, 1989

BEN JOHNSON's lawyer and financial adviser painted sharply different portraits of the world 100-meter record-holder at an inquiry into drug use among Canadian track and field athletes. Ross Earl, one of Johnson's closest confidants, challenged the portrait of an uneducated man-child painted by lawyer Edward Futerman. Futerman has portrayed his 27-year-old client as an impressionable youth who never understood the implications of taking banned drugs - once citing Johnson's inability to place a long-distance telephone call as proof. But Earl, a schoolteacher and former president of Johnson's Toronto track club, described the sprinter as a clever wheeler-dealer whose shrewd bargaining won him his first house and, later, a large lot north of Toronto.